Tech Spot #2 - GIFT City, Gandhinagar, India

India leads the way in Smart Rubbish

The Gujarat International Finance & Tec-City (GIFT City) is being developed to serve India’s rapidly growing financial services sector near Gandhinagar

India’s new smart city provides a financial services hub that offers global firms world-class infrastructure and facilities while attracting the country’s top talent to a landmark site covering 886 acres near Gandhinagar.

It is now also benefitting from the world’s first integrated, automated waste and recyclable segregation plant.

An automated waste collection system transports waste at high speed through underground tubes using a partial vacuum to a reception facility where it is separated, compacted and sealed in containers. When the container is full, it is transported away, emptied, and if required, the contents can be recycled.

Such systems are gaining ground in the waste industry, and many new projects are in the planning stages or in development. For example, Helsinki and the neighbouring city of Vantaa in Finland are planning to incorporate automated waste collection systems into their new urban development projects.

Envac, a supplier of underground automated waste collection systems, has installed the GIFT City plant which has been in operation since 1 April 2015.

On completion in 2025–2028, the plant will handle the waste for the entire city, which is expected to be over 400 tonnes per day generated from GIFT City’s 25,000 apartments, 100,000 residents and a working population of over 500,000. The site’s retail zone will also attract between 25,000–50,000 visitors each week.

GIFT City will comprise 112 towers each ranging from 25– 60 floors, residential and commercial zones, hospitals and schools and a world-class trade centre.

Each building will contain two waste disposal chutes, which will feed in to one of seven on-site collection stations, covering organic waste and mixed recyclables. Envac will also be responsible for sorting the mixed recyclables in a deal that makes GIFT City the first site in the world to introduce a system that addresses every element of the waste collection process. Talks are currently underway to include an onsite waste-to-energy plant, which would deliver a full closed-loop solution.

On developing the project, Graham Bell, regional president of Envac Middle East and India, said: “This is undoubtedly one of the most exciting projects that we have had the opportunity to work on, not just because of its sheer scale but also because of its diversity and the fact that it’s a world first.”

Ramakant Jha, managing director & group CEO at GIFT City, commented: “GIFT City is India’s first smart city, which is being developed as a global financial hub. Being a smart city, most of the infrastructure we are developing will add value to the overall development and the automated waste collection system at city level will remove human interaction in the collection and disposal of waste.”

GIFT City’s two fraction automated underground waste system, which is expected to be worth almost £50,000,000, will become one of the largest automated underground waste systems in the world on completion.